For centuries, gardeners have attempted to breed blue roses with no success. But now, thanks to modern biotechnology, the elusive blue rose may finally be attainable. Researchers have found a way to express pigment-producing ...

In a recent study in the Journal of The American Chemical Society, Professor Tewodros Asefa and Associate Professor Jeffrey Boyd synthesized nanostructured silica particles, considered to be promising drug carriers, that ...

To fight your enemies, it helps to know their weaknesses. And, the more specific your knowledge, the easier it is to undermine their defenses. If your enemy sits safe behind a giant wall, for example, its valuable to know ...

Researchers at Utrecht University have gained new insights into the structure and function of a protein complex that maintains the outer membrane of a bacteria. Shutting down this protein complex makes it impossible for the ...

There are many rational reasons that motivate consumers to spend US$65 billion annually on household cleaning products. But non-rational mechanisms are nevertheless still at work in the cleaning products market, as in all ...

What do cattle, European badgers, and gut bacteria have in common? They are all central players in a complex web surrounding a disease that affects multiple species, often with devastating results—tuberculosis. Now, new ...

Bacteria have been found to exhibit a behaviour characterized by statistics and can be described by power-law distributions. For example, E. coli bacteria have an appendage called a flagellum, an appendage that works as a ...

Silver has been used for centuries as an antimicrobial to kill harmful bacteria. Ancient civilizations applied the metal to open wounds. Ship captains tossed silver coins into storage barrels to keep drinking water fresh.

The bacteria [bækˈtɪərɪə] (help·info) (singular: bacterium)[α] are a large group of unicellular microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria are ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, water, and deep in the Earth's crust, as well as in organic matter and the live bodies of plants and animals. There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water; in all, there are approximately five nonillion (5×1030) bacteria on Earth, forming much of the world's biomass. Bacteria are vital in recycling nutrients, with many steps in nutrient cycles depending on these organisms, such as the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere and putrefaction. However, most bacteria have not been characterized, and only about half of the phyla of bacteria have species that can be grown in the laboratory. The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology.

There are approximately ten times as many bacterial cells in the human flora of bacteria as there are human cells in the body, with large numbers of bacteria on the skin and as gut flora. The vast majority of the bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of the immune system, and a few are beneficial. However, a few species of bacteria are pathogenic and cause infectious diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy and bubonic plague. The most common fatal bacterial diseases are respiratory infections, with tuberculosis alone killing about 2 million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. In developed countries, antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections and in agriculture, so antibiotic resistance is becoming common. In industry, bacteria are important in sewage treatment, the production of cheese and yoghurt through fermentation, as well as in biotechnology, and the manufacture of antibiotics and other chemicals.

Once regarded as plants constituting the class Schizomycetes, bacteria are now classified as prokaryotes. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles. Although the term bacteria traditionally included all prokaryotes, the scientific classification changed after the discovery in the 1990s that prokaryotes consist of two very different groups of organisms that evolved independently from an ancient common ancestor. These evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea.